>> NARRATOR: On<i> Mega Movers:</i> four warplanes are lost, then found. Now they have to be moved from snake-infested jungles... >> One of our guides was bitten by a death adder, and he died in about 20 minutes. >> NARRATOR: ...to 27 stories below the polar ice cap... >> Anybody would have fallen would be instant death. >> NARRATOR: ...to 200 feet down on the ocean floor. >> My biggest concern was that I would have some sort of diving accident. >> NARRATOR: Mega Movers battle the elements and the horrors to recover these priceless relics. <font color="#FFFF00">Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00">44 BLUE PRODUCTIONS</font> Greenland-- 75 miles west Angmagssalik, near the Arctic Circle, one of the most desolate places on Earth; a barren landscape of snow and ice. May 1992. An expedition of 40 mega movers funded by Kentucky entrepreneur Roy Shoffner landed here. Equipped with survival gear and heavy machinery, Shoffner and his crew had one thing in mind: recover a treasure entombed 27 stories straight down beneath this polar ice cap; a World War II Lockheed P-38 Lightning had crashed here on July 15, 1942. The crew survived, but the planes were ditched. For the next half century, nearly seven feet of annual snowfall slowly swallowed up the planes. They were destined to become lost frozen relics of the war. With the help of maps, photos and eyewitness accounts from crewmen onboard, mega movers knew where the squadron had gone down, but it took ground-penetrating radar to pinpoint their exact location under the ice cap. Over the years, there were 11 recovery attempts: all failed. The 12th would make history. >> CARDIN: We looked at all of the pictures that were taken on the day they landed in July of '42 and we determined that the P-38, which at that time was called P-38 Delta, was in the best shape on the day that they landed. >> NARRATOR: Bob Cardin, a former helicopter pilot was the project manager. >> CARDIN: In 1981, nobody knew anything about the glacier and how much snow fell there or anything else. They really thought that they would go there, brush the snow off and put gas in 'em and fly 'em away. They didn't find anything. Then as time goes on into the mid-'80s, there are several more groups that go there and try it. Still nothing. But every time that a group goes, a lesson is learned. >> NARRATOR: These lessons reinforced the dangerous challenges they'd be facing. One: deadly weather. Subzero temperatures and violent snowstorms put the crew at risk. Two: boring through ice. Methods had to be devised to reach the plane without destroying it. Three: piece by piece. They had to disassemble the plane and haul it up 27 stories through the ice. The plan: they would first bore a two-and-a-half-inch-diameter hole straight down to the plane. Then, using a thermal melting unit called "The Super Gopher," they would widen that hole to create a four-foot-diameter shaft so that crew members could be lowered down to it. Next a high-pressure water cannon would be used to carve a cavity around the plane. Finally, it would be disassembled and hoisted piece by piece to the surface. Turns out feeding the steam probe was not easy. >> CARDIN: Water at the end of the nozzle, the water would come out. It's 180 degrees and it's 3,000 psi. And the operator would just hold it straight down into the glacier and just slowly let gravity pull it down. >> They hit the plane. They hit the plane on number nine. At 12:24 p.m. they have hit the plane. >> Hi, Weegee. >> How you doing? >> Congratulations on your hit. Congratulations on your plane. >> Yeah, terrific, isn't it? I was afraid you guys would take it apart before... >> Number nine was the lucky one, must be. >> NARRATOR: Now they could start the daunting task of melting through 268 feet of snow and ice using the Super Gopher, which was specially designed just for this move. >> CARDIN: All it is is a heated cone that's fired up with jet fuel, heats the water. >> NARRATOR: Water was piped into the cone through a set of copper coils on the base. The coils heated the water to 160 degrees, making the cone of the Gopher hot enough to melt through the ice. But before the Super Gopher could begin melting down into the glacier, the team first built a prefabricated Gopher hut to protect them from the wind and snow as they worked. Next, they positioned a 12-foot steel beam over the hole and hooked the Gopher onto a one-ton chain hoist suspended from the beam. Finally the crew assembled quarter-inch steel piping and lowered it the full length of the hole to the plane. >> CARDIN: Just slipped the Gopher over the guide pipe and then when you turn the boiler on, it melts the ice and the gopher just slides down the pipe. When it stops going down, you're at the airplane. >> NARRATOR: For the first two days the weather held, then the harsh reality of their environment hit. An unexpected storm packing 50-mile-per-hour winds slammed into their camp. >> CARDIN: It is so severe that if you were outside and you have unprotected skin, you would be literally eat away just like a sandblasting machine, and you can't see the hand in front of your face, so you have to have 100% protection. >> Bob's going out the door. >> NARRATOR: The storm buried their camp. After digging out, work pressed on. Finally, after eight days, the Gopher reached the P-38. It was hoisted out of the shaft along with the circulating and pump hoses. For Bob and the rest of the team, it was the moment they had been waiting for. They each get harnessed and lowered into the shaft to see a piece of history that had been literally frozen in time for half a century. >> You're looking good, Royce. >> You'll have to send me a picture. >> We sure will. >> NARRATOR: But with the excitement came the fear and danger of being lowered 27 stories into this icy abyss. >> CARDIN: From the time that you suited up to go down the hole to the time you suited up to come back, that, to me, was by far the most dangerous thing that a person could do. You had to have two-way communication all the way down, and even more importantly, all the way up because now you got a one-ton chain hoist pulling you up, and if your leg got caught in something, it could rip your leg off no problem. >> NARRATOR: It was a 20-minute, 27-story, white-knuckle thrill ride away. >> CARDIN: I kinda got amused as I was going down through the ice and snow. I saw dirt and stuff in layers and I said, "Man, this is like passing through time. Going down through time." >> NARRATOR: But the excitement of the ride down was nothing compared to seeing the P-38 for the first time. >> CARDIN: I looked down there and there's this airplane. And you really realize, you know, that you're standing on a piece of history. >> Good job. You're making those ice cubes. >> NARRATOR: The crew was now ready to begin carving the cavity around the plane. With a 52-foot wingspan and a 37-foot length, they would have to hollow out a work area nearly the size of a 2,000-square-foot house. To do that, they used a high-pressure hose called a "water cannon" which shot hot water from a boiler on the surface, allowing them to melt the ice around the plane. The melted ice water was then pumped up and out of the shaft, reheated, and recirculated. >> CARDIN: As the airplane actually evolved out of the glacier, it was really an eerie thing to see. It's virtually a brand-new airplane. On the day she landed, she had 74 hours of flight time and she was 62 days old. Worked 24 hours a day, and it took us two weeks of work just to uncover the whole airplane. Here is something that nobody has seen for 50 years. >> NARRATOR: Next, the crew began the painstaking job of disassembling the 50-year-old time capsule. >> Bingo. Let it be written. Let it be done. One inch at a time. Big Red up one inch. >> Big Red up one inch. >> CARDIN: We took the plane up in 11 major pieces. The propellers, the engines, the tail booms, the tail section and the nose. We didn't want to have to handle a lot of stuff to bring up. If our equipment could handle it, we wanted to bring it up as big as we could rather than as little as we could. >> NARRATOR: Working 27 stories below a mountain of ice, dismantling the plane was a tedious and deadly job. >> CARDIN: You'd be concerned with the carbon monoxide from the generators, that the weather will all of a sudden now make the carbon monoxide go one way instead of the other because of the snow and the winds. I think the greatest concerns was somebody falling into the hole from the surface. Or somebody dropping something in the hole onto somebody, you know, 'cause you're talking 27 stories, uh, you know. Anybody who would've fall, it would be instant death. Anything, you know, drop a, you know, a wrench or anything into the hole and it hit somebody, it would have killed them. >> NARRATOR: Each dismantled piece was carefully logged and recorded before it was lifted to the surface. Smaller parts were raised through the original shaft. But the larger parts wouldn't fit, so using the Super Gopher, they melted one additional hole, doubling the size of the opening. >> CARDIN: So now we have a slot that's eight feet across instead of four. And believe it or not, we were able to bring up the entire airplane except for the center section up that eight-foot shaft. >> NARRATOR: The plane's fuselage, weighing nearly 7,000 pounds, was the largest and most difficult section to raise. It was far too big to bring up the shaft, so they had to drill three more holes, widening the opening to 20 feet across. They could now attempt to move the last piece to the surface. Cables were attached to the aircraft that ran up to several winches. Then, using a powerful manually operated hoist, a crew member cranked four complete turns just to lift the load one-quarter of an inch. Meanwhile, another crewmember rode on top of the fuselage to make sure it raised evenly through the narrow shaft and didn't get caught on cables, hoses, or jagged ice. >> CARDIN: We had gotten the airplane right to the surface, right there, ready to hook the cables on, take it out. And I said to myself, "Oh, my God, it's gonna fall down in the hole. >> CARDIN: 45 degrees out of the hole, there was a nylon strap, and it's not the same. We knew what it was. We didn't know how to... we couldn't stop it, and I said to myself, "Oh, my God, it's gonna fall down a hole," which it didn't, but we didn't know. >> NARRATOR: To everyone's relief, the entire plane was now out of its icy tomb. >> CARDIN: And then the six of us got on the airplane and opened a bottle of champagne (camera shutter clicks) and then it, that evening, over a bottle of Scotch, we christened her<i> Glacier Girl.</i> >> NARRATOR: After ten years of restoration, on October 26, 2002, she returned to the skies for first time in over 60 years. (spectators cheering) Today, she remains one of the biggest air show attractions across the country. >> CARDIN: When I think about what we had to go through, all the adversity that took place, all of the problems that were just all of a sudden thrown in front of us that we overcame to get to this point... well worth it. >> NARRATOR: 8,000 miles away, another team of mega movers braved a deadly environment to recover a rare downed aircraft. Sentani, New Guinea: Hidden away in a dense jungle was a rare World War II P-61. Designed to be a night-fighter, this menacing plane was nicknamed the "Black Widow." >> STRINE: It<i> is</i> painted black. It's a twin-engined, twin-tailed airplane, similar to the P-38, but it's a large aircraft. It's the size of a medium bomber and was actually flown by just a single pilot. It was the largest fighter aircraft produced during World War II. >> NARRATOR: On January 10, 1945, this new P-61 was on a test flight, piloted by Lieutenant Logan Southfield. >> STRINE: He flew around the area for a while, and then came in across the airfield at about uh, ten or 20 feet off of the ground, buzzed the airfield, heading straight for the mountain, and pulled up. >> NARRATOR: But it was too late. He crash-landed on the side of the 7,000-foot-tall Mount Cyclops. >> STRINE: And it landed on a huge rock outcrop. >> NARRATOR: The pilot survived. However, the Black Widow would be all but forgotten. In that part of the jungle, there were no roads, no trails, and no way the aircraft could be salvaged-- at least not for another 45 years. In 1985, mega movers, led by Russ Strine and his father, Gene, set out on a mission to find the plane. They've devoted their lives to their aircraft museum and had hoped to recover and preserve this P-61-- one of only four known Black Widows to exist in the world. Arriving in New Guinea, their crew made the grueling six-and- a-half-hour climb up the side of Mount Cyclops, where they discovered the Black Widow almost entirely buried beneath vines and ferns. >> STRINE: And it sure didn't look much like a P-61 at that point in time, but our people determined that, gosh, there was still hydraulic fluid in the hydraulic tanks. There was still air in the tires. >> NARRATOR: Moving this P-61 off of Mount Cyclops would be a monumental task, one that would cost a man his life. Working in constant danger, the challenges of recovering this plane were daunting. One: treacherous terrain. The plane was on a 60-degree slope. Two: deadly snakes. The area was crawling with crawling with lethal snakes. Three: break it up. The plane couldn't be moved in one piece. Because this P-61 weighed nearly 30,000 pounds and had crashed 7,000 feet up the mountain, no helicopter could lift the entire weight of the plane at that altitude. That left these mega movers with only one choice. >> STRINE: We realized that we had to disassemble it, and because of the size of the hardware that held the aircraft together, and not to mention 45 years' worth of corrosion, we had to figure out how in the heck we were gonna get the airplane apart. >> NARRATOR: Of all the challenges, it was the snakes that had everyone constantly on edge. The jungle was infested with some of the deadliest snakes in the world, like the death adder, the taipan, and the Papuan black snake. Their bite could kill a person within minutes. >> STRINE: There were snakes living in the aircraft, and snake eggs, so it was very dangerous. >> NARRATOR: The plan: to move the P-61 they would have to cut a clearing through the thick, vine-choked jungle. Next, they would have to disassemble the plane piece by piece. Smaller pieces would be bundled in nets and carried down by foot. Finally, the larger pieces of the plane-- including the engines, wings and fuselage-- would be airlifted by helicopter to a makeshift landing pad nearby. January 10, 1985, work began on disassembling this World War II fighter. >> STRINE: Our work crews, if they had to get up on the wings or on the fuselage, would have to tie a rope around their waist and then tie it to some other part of the aircraft, like for instance, the propeller. Then they were safe. They could move around, but they wouldn't slide or fall off the back of the airplane. >> NARRATOR: They started with the smaller pieces. The job of disassembling the plane was tedious and at times seemed nearly impossible. With no electricity, every bolt, every screw had to be removed by hand, and many of them were corroded and wouldn't budge. >> I'm having a hard time here 'cause it's going down at an angle. >> Yeah. >> And every time I let go of the hammer. >> STRINE: We had what we called runners, and these people would leave the crash site, carrying parts down the mountain, parts that were light enough for them to handle. >> STRINE: Cyclops. >> Radio: All right, you need anything? >> STRINE: Yeah, I guess we oughta have a couple cans of corn. A can of Spam. They would return the next day with sacks of rice, and beans and fruit to replenish the crew with food, and so that went on day after day after day. >> NARRATOR: The intense humidity in the rainforest provided an unforeseen challenge. >> STRINE: This cloud formed right at the level that the aircraft was, and although it didn't always rain where the crew was working, uh, visibility sometimes came down to as thick as you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. >> NARRATOR: Conditions were brutal. The crew constantly battled the elements. >> STRINE: There were leeches, and as our men climbed the mountain, the leeches would get on them, without their knowledge and would crawl above their boots and attach themselves to their skin. >> NARRATOR: Despite the horrors of their surroundings, work pressed on until all of the smaller pieces were removed. Now it was time to tackle the bigger sections. They started with the wings and they proved to be even more difficult then anticipated. >> STRINE: We found that we had to cut the wing bolts. There were bolts about an inch and a half in diameter that held the wings on, and because of the limited access, you didn't want to cut the aircraft structure away and destroy it, and it just took days to even get the wings off of it. Four! >> STRINE: Can't push in. >> Obviously, it's clear. >> STRINE: Oh, I heard something snap. (grunting) >> Okay! (cheering and whooping) >> Well, we got it. >> NARRATOR: Celebrations were welcomed by the crew because there were sad times, too. Tragedy struck one afternoon. >> STRINE: One of our guides actually was bitten by a death adder. When that happens, there is no reversal and he died in about 20 minutes. >> NARRATOR: The loss shocked everyone. It was a somber reminder of the deadly elements they were working in. It took the recovery team six expeditions over six years to completely disassemble the Black Widow. February 1989-- the final expedition up Mount Cyclops to airlift out the large pieces of the P-61. But before a helicopter could be brought in at the base of the mountain, a landing pad had to be built. About three acres worth of trees had to be cut down so that the helicopter's rotor had clearance and the pilot had the necessary safety zone that he needed to come in over the aircraft and hook up the, uh, the nets the and the, and the ropes. >> NARRATOR: The downed trees were used to build a helipad. >> STRINE: This was not sturdy enough to support the entire weight of the helicopter, but it was used as a staging area and the helicopter could hover over it. It could just touch his wheels on it and let his loadmaster and his crew off and, uh, also pick up passengers to take them back down the mountain. >> NARRATOR: Lifting one piece at a time, the chopper moved the remaining sections. >> STRINE: And the loadmaster did not realize that that wing would catch lift from the air being generated by the helicopter's rotors. And so the wing began to spin and began to go faster and faster and faster. And pretty soon, the helicopter started to sway back and forth. The wing was actually moving the helicopter. >> STRINE: It very much could have brought the helicopter down, and I think that everybody's fear was that the wing was actually going to fly, and could perhaps fly up into the rotor blades of the helicopter. And, if that would have happened, of course, it would have been a disaster. >> NARRATOR: The pilot battled to maintain control of the chopper. He radioed that he was going to attempt to safely lower the wing. >> STRINE: Everybody stopped what they were doing. They would come out and watch the helicopter. >> NARRATOR: If he couldn't lower the wing, he'd cut it loose, almost certainly destroying it. Amazingly, he pulled off this risky maneuver. >> STRINE: Then, once that stopped, he released it, and then the load master thought how they had rigged the wing and came up with a new process. And, the next time they came to lift it, it went off without a hitch. >> NARRATOR: It would take five days for the helicopter to move the dismantled parts of the Black Widow off the mountain. For Russ and the rest of the recovery team, it was the end of a mission 45 years in the making. For the tiny village of Sentani, it was the event of the century. >> STRINE: Schoolkids, everybody in the entire town, was there to see this happening. And we got everything put into one place on the field there. Then our next dilemma was crate all this stuff up and get it ready to go aboard a ship. >> NARRATOR: Eventually, all parts of the plane were placed in crates and transported nearly 20 miles by truck to the docks in the port city of Jayapura. There they were loaded onto a ship bound for the United States. Two months later, the P-61 arrived in Baltimore, and was then shipped to the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania. Today, the plane continues to undergo extensive restoration. >> STRINE: When I look at the P-61 today, I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment. I'm glad we did it. After all, we're saving a historic relic for future generations. >> NARRATOR: The Great Sitkin, one of the largest volcanoes of the western Aleutian Islands. On this rugged, windswept patch of land sits a B-24D Liberator. It has been here since it crash-landed on January 18, 1943. In the summer of 1995, a team of military mega movers landed here to salvage this plane. They learned about it the year prior. Their goal: add it to the Hill Aerospace Museum in Utah. Master Sergeant Paul Cragun was the recovery team leader. >> PAUL CRAGUN: Because the aircraft did do a belly landing, all four engines-- the propellers on those engines-- had been damaged, and the corrosion that set in was very extensive. >> NARRATOR: Among those in the group was the pilot of the downed World War II bomber, Colonel Ernest Pruett. >> ERNEST "PAPPY" PRUETT: It really tore me apart to see what has been done to the aircraft, but I'm sure that, with the efforts, the group I'm here with will be able to take it out. >> NARRATOR: Colonel Pruett was piloting one of six B-24 bombers that took off from Adak Island on January 18, 1943, heading for the harbor of Kiska Island 500 miles away. Their mission: bomb three Japanese supply ships. >> CRAGUN: The B-24D bomber carried a top turret that had twin 50-caliber machine guns on it. It had a nose gun, which is a single 50-caliber machine gun. It had a tail turret that had two 50-caliber machine guns on it. It also had single 50-caliber machine guns at both right and left waist positions on the back part of the fuselage. So it carried quite a bit of armament, and they carried a lot of firepower. >> NARRATOR: Colonel Pruett would never get a chance to unleash that firepower on the Japanese fleet. >> CRAGUN: He didn't have enough fuel to make it to Cold Bay, so he decided to belly- land the airplane on Great Sitkin Island. >> NARRATOR: He made an emergency landing on the tundra, sliding nearly 1,000 feet, and barely missing several large boulders. The team of mega movers was made up of Air Force reservists who volunteered for the work, and was funded by the Aerospace Heritage Foundation of Utah, a private organization that salvages planes. But they would be working with very limited money. The only way to move the plane was to cut it up, and that would be very difficult given the extraordinary challenges they faced. One: bluffs. The plane would have to be moved 40 feet down a sheer drop. Two: rigging. They would have to devise a system of cables and winches. The plan: They would have to disassemble the B-24 and drag the pieces nearly a quarter-mile to the edge of a 40-foot bluff. Then they would be lowered onto the beach, loaded onto a boat, and transported to a facility for restoration. What they lacked in funding, they made up for in ingenuity. They could not afford a helicopter to help with the move. >> CRAGUN: We had to plan on the amount of cable that we needed to take, the amount of pallets that we needed to take, all the equipment, such as power saws, handsaws, shovels, picks, in order to dig part of that aircraft out of the tundra that had been buried over the years through the overgrowth of the plant material. >> NARRATOR: They barely got started when they suffered a serious setback. >> CRAGUN: We tried landing the boat onto the beach, but we found that there were large boulders. One of the rocks punctured a small hole in the boat. >> NARRATOR: The<i> Polar Bear</i> was repaired, but now the boat had to be anchored nearly 250 yards from the beach, making an already difficult move even more grueling. The crew was forced to use a smaller Zodiac boat to shuttle their equipment to shore. >> Hey, watch for the rocks, guys! >> NARRATOR: Reaching the island, the team faced the backbreaking task of hauling the 350-pound cargo pallets to the wreckage. >> CRAGUN: We attached seven, eight people to each pallet, and we could only go about 100 to 150 yards, and everyone was exhausted. >> Like a bunch of damn Clydesdales! >> NARRATOR: It took an hour to drag the pallets to the crash site. >> Come on. >> NARRATOR: Now began the tedious work of digging out the B-24 from under more than half a century of overgrowth. The aircraft exposed, they began dismantling it bolt by bolt, using brute force. >> CRAGUN: We rolled the engines off the wing and onto those pallets. We used cargo straps to strap the engines onto the pallets. >> NARRATOR: A cable ran from the<i> Polar Bear</i> to the pallet. >> CRAGUN: We radioed the<i> Polar</i> <i>Bear.</i> >> Okay, we'll be ready in about five minutes. >> CRAGUN: And the people that were manning the winch told them that the pallet was ready to pull, and they commenced pulling the parts off the mountain. (cheering) NARRATOR: The idea: haul each piece down the side of the bluff-- an extremely dangerous process. >> CRAGUN: We drug the aircraft parts down off the island. We had to drop the parts off that bluff onto the beach. But we realized, with the weight of the aircraft parts, and the overhanging tundra on the top of the cliff, that it would be a very dangerous situation. Anytime you deal with objects of a large size and a large weight with long distances, and hooking onto them with cable, and pulling them across the tundra, we always were worried about injuries. And we were very careful trying to keep the people away from the cable when we were pulling. We didn't want the cable to snap and injure somebody significantly. >> NARRATOR: If a cable snapped, it would act like a steel whip, lashing out wildly in all directions. >> CRAGUN: With such a long distance and the weight of the parts that we were pulling off the mountain, the three-eighths cable stretched significantly. In that stretching process, the cable would twist and kink and that would make a weak spot in the cable. >> NARRATOR: And that weak spot did give out while hauling one large piece. (grunting) >> Badly bruised thigh lacerations. >> Do we have enough first aid equipment? ! >> NARRATOR: Everything was going great until a cable snapped. Several crew members were injured... >> Badly bruised thigh lacerations and one arm that's lacerated. >> NARRATOR: ...fortunately, none seriously. During the next ten days, they hauled the four engines and smaller pieces to the edge of the 40-foot-tall bluff. >> Yee-ha! >> NARRATOR: Careful to align the pieces with the boat, one by one they were lowered onto the beach until all that remained were the wings. >> CRAGUN: The wings, because of their weight and their length, were very cumbersome. >> NARRATOR: Studying the wings, they discovered the top was smoother then the bottom, so, utilizing the winches aboard the <i>Polar Bear,</i> they flipped them over. (cheering) >> NARRATOR: And it was easy sailing over the rough terrain. >> NARRATOR: Now they faced one of the biggest challenges of the entire move: lowering these massive pieces of plane onto the beach. Before dragging the pieces across the rocky beach to the water's edge, wooden beams were laid down so the plane would not sustain further damage. The final challenge was getting 18 tons of plane pieces to the ship anchored 250 yards offshore. For this they got very creative. >> CRAGUN: We acquired some buoys that had been washed up on many of the islands in the Aleutian chain that were used to hold cargo netting from all the fishing fleets. We used all these buoys to hook onto the parts of the aircraft and the pallets, float them across the water the 250 yards to the boat. And luckily, that problem was solved. >> NARRATOR: Over the next ten years, the aircraft was fully restored and put on display in the Hill Aerospace Museum. Out of more than 18,000 B-24s manufactured during World War II, it remains one of only 20 that exist in the world today. >> CRAGUN: The opportunities to go out into a remote site and recover a part of history are very few and far between. Those individuals that get to participate in those type of activities are very privileged individuals, and I find myself to be one of those. >> NARRATOR: Bergen, Norway, November 2006. 200 feet down in the dark, frigid waters of the North Sea sat one of the most deadly fighter planes of World War II: a German Focke-Wulf 190. On December 15, 1943, this plane crashed into the icy sea. The pilot survived, but the plane was never seen again until more than 60 years later when the Norwegian navy, under the command of Lieutenant Wiggo Korsvik, discovered it with the help of a remote underwater vehicle. >> KORSVIK: Actually, this was an airplane in very good condition. If you think about it, it's been down there for more than 60 years, and the whole plane was intact. And also we discovered that it was not sunken down into the mud or in the sea floor; it was actually laying on top a hard rock surface, and some loose rocks as well. >> NARRATOR: Fearing other divers might learn of the plane's location and strip it, they immediately salvaged the two 13-millimeter machine guns. >> Bingo! >> NARRATOR: Holding these rare World War II treasures brought to life their remarkable find. They spent a year devising a plan to move the Focke-Wulf to the surface, a mission that posed some huge challenges. One: deep dives. Working 20 stories down, divers could last for only six minutes at a time. Two: icy darkness. The pitch-black water heightened the dangers. Three: jagged edges. The wreckage could rupture a diver's tank. >> GAIR TANGEN: Difficult job and the most dangerous job for them was to stick to the timetable, I think. >> KORSVIK: It's very deep and it's dark, and when you have the diver all by himself down at this depth, you, you're always worry about him getting stuck down there. >> NARRATOR: The plan: divers must first rig metal beams under the Focke-Wulf. Next, heavy nylon straps would be wrapped around the beams and the aircraft forming a tight lifting cradle. Finally, a crane would raise the plane out of the water and set it down onto a ferry boat, which would tow it to shore. In the summer of 2006, they began the dangerous and complex process of raising this plane from the bottom of the North Sea. >> KORSVIK: What we had to do because of the depth, we had our short rope going down to the back of the plane. And the divers would go down on that short rope. And the divers had to plan and do the dives very quickly. So as soon as we had the short rope placed next to the plane, the divers would then have basically three minutes to do the job down on the wreck. And then he could go directly back to the surface without doing any decompression. >> NARRATOR: The goal of these dives: attach the iron beams, also known as "H" pins, under the wings and fuselage. They carefully monitored the time divers spent under water, constantly reminding them of one thing. >> TANGEN: To not be too eager on the bottom. Because as they have dived down to the aircraft several times, they were more and more eager in doing that, and to get the aircraft mounted with the equipment and get it up. >> NARRATOR: Battling the icy darkness, it was extremely slow-going getting the beams in place. >> TANGEN: They had no time to see the wreck, so some of them said, I haven't seen the wreck. I've been there eight times now, but I haven't seen the wreck. I've only seen what I'm focused on, doing the job. Mounting that kind of bar, mounting that kind of lifting equipment. >> NARRATOR: The darkness made it terrifying to work around the razor-sharp wreckage. >> KORSVIK: My biggest concern, uh, during the operation was that I would have some sort of diving accident. >> NARRATOR: It took weeks to attach the beams. But while they were doing it, they discovered another serious problem. Six decades of rust had corroded rivets, loosening the plane's single engine and propeller. >> TANGEN: So we had three parts there. You have the aircraft, you have the engine, and you have the propeller loose. >> NARRATOR: They feared the plane would not survive the lift. >> TANGEN: The whole aircraft would have torn apart, and dismantled itself. We had to tighten it up to take it up as a whole component. >> NARRATOR: Divers secured a specially-built lifting attachment to the nose of the aircraft and wrapped reinforcement straps around the engine and propeller. November 1, 2006, more than 18 months after the recovery began, the infamous World War II German fighter was ready to be lifted from its watery grave. The aircraft was facing downhill at a 40-degree angle, making an already-difficult lift even more dangerous. >> KORSVIK: The angle of the plane was of some concern because when we started doing the lift, the plane itself could start to move forward and maybe hit something, and, and, and some of the lifting straps or the arrangement done on the airplane could break loose. >> NARRATOR: Fearing the worst, on the morning of the lift a diver made one last check of the rigging. He then attached a hook to the plane. The signal was given and a crane aboard the ferry boat <i>Emma Flicker</i> slowly began moving the Focke-Wulf to the surface. >> KORSVIK: We used the RUV to observe when the crane started to lift the airplane from the sea bed. >> KORSVIK: And we could see that everything worked just fine. The plane lifted very neatly from the sea bottom. >> KORSVIK: We stopped at ten meters, and at ten meters we did another check with divers. When they confirmed the thumbs up, everything okay, then we continued to lift. >> TANGEN: When we had the aircraft near the surface, then we stopped the process and, and tried to inspect it again, just to see is everything okay now, because the critical point is when you reach the surface. >> NARRATOR: It was the defining moment. >> KORSVIK: The worst case scenario as the plane broke the surface would be that it was so heavy because of all the water inside and the mud, that the H pins we had underneath the wings, or the wings themselves, couldn't take the pressure and break. And that would be probably the end of that airplane. >> NARRATOR: The crane operator slowly lifted the Focke-Wulf out of the water. >> KORSVIK: A very, very good feeling. I was smiling; I was looking at the plane and I had the same "wow" feeling as when I saw it down on the sea floor the first time. It's amazing to see an airplane like this, a wreck in such good condition. With the German markings, the swastika, and the iron cross on the wing tips. It was an amazing feeling and it was just cheering and thumbs up from everybody. (speaking Norwegian) <font color="#FFFF00">Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00">44 BLUE PRODUCTIONS</font> Captioned by <font color="#00FFFF">Media Access Group at WGBH</font> access.wgbh.org
